"The secret of being a bore is to tell everything." - Voltaire, Discours en vers sur l'homme, 1737

***

Julian Dibbell repors on 'women's viagra'

"Let us spray

Billed as libido in an atomiser, PT-141 will finally offer women the chance to turn on their sexual desire as and when they need it. Or so the science says. But there are concerns. Will sex in a spray usher in an age of 'McNookie' - quick easy couplings low on emotional nutrition?...

A dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as 15 minutes. Women, according to one set of results, feel 'genital warmth, tingling and throbbing', not to mention 'a strong desire to have sex'...

The precise mechanisms by which PT-141 does its job remain unclear, but the rough idea is this: where Viagra acts on the circulatory system, helping blood flow into the penis, PT-141 goes to the brain itself. 'It's not merely allowing a sexual response to take place more easily,' explains Michael A Perelman, co-director of the Human Sexuality Program at New York Presbyterian Hospital and a sexual-medicine adviser on the PT-141 trials. 'It may be having an effect, literally, on how we think and feel.'...

Two years earlier, and just three years past its start-up, the company had bought the rights to develop a substance called Melanotan II. Originally isolated by University of Arizona researchers looking for a way to give Caucasians a healthy, sunblocking tan without exposing them to dangerous ultraviolet rays, Melanotan II achieved that and more: it also appeared to facilitate weight loss, increase sexual appetite and act as an anti-inflammatory, too. Quickly dubbed 'the Barbie drug', Melanotan II seemed too good to be true...

Pfaus's results were powerful evidence not only of PT-141's potential as a treatment for women but of its ability to do more than just move blood around. A male rat's erection on its own doesn't say much about the rat's state of mind. A female rat's coquetry, on the other hand, says all we need to know about her intentions and desires. Rats aren't people, to be sure, and as test subjects they suffer from a frustrating inability to tell us, in words, how they experience what they're subjected to. But that has an upside, too, explains Pfaus. 'The bad thing about animals is they don't talk. The good thing is they don't lie.'...

Even assuming that PT-141 ultimately performs as well in broad use as it has in trials, even granting that it can improve sex lives as effectively as a lifetime of erotic exploration, the deeper challenge posed by the prospect of a sexual techno-fix remains: is this really the kind of fix we want? To have desire available at any time, from the nozzle of an inhaler?...

The funny thing is, it appears there's a certain humanlike subjectiveness to the sex life of lab animals as well. When Jim Pfaus tested PT-141 on his female rats, he based his experimental design partly on the work of Raul Paredes, a fellow rat sexologist testing the effects of something more elusive: personal autonomy. That's a tricky thing to measure, but it can be done. Paredes did it like this: first, he looked at rat couples living in standard, box-shaped cages and recorded the details of their sexual behaviour. Then, he altered the cages in only one particular: he divided them into two chambers with a clear wall broken only by one opening, too small for the males to get through but just right for the females. Architecturally it was a minor change, but what it did for the females was huge. It let them get away from the males whenever they chose to, and thereby made it entirely their choice whether to have sex. Paredes then observed the rats' behaviour in this altered setting. Here's what he found: the effects of giving a female rat greater personal control over her sex life are essentially the same as those of giving her PT-141. Autonomy, in other words, is as real an aphrodisiac as any substance known to science...

'What do we tell postmenopausal women who have lost their desire, despite being in a loving and caring relationship? "Sorry, there's nothing we can do," or worse, "Sorry, but you shouldn't be having sex anyway"?'

The argument is a strong one. But so is Tiefer's. Each defends a vital sort of autonomy - the power of self-knowledge on the one hand; on the other, the freedom to grasp whatever tools of self-improvement are available to us. And if, after all the trials are done and the prescriptions are filled, PT-141 diminishes the former as much as it expands the latter, who's to say which matters more? Add up all the pluses and minuses, and in the end the sum may be zero. In short, no net change one way or the other in the world's total supply of sexual happiness.

But then, no one's asking PT-141 to change the world. It's enough to hope that someday, when you need it most, it just might get you through the night."


HWMNBN: i like the concluding paragraphs of that article
this is why our writers have a long way to go


Wah, an aphrodisiac that actually works. But will doping someone with it be considered date rape?

And I'm sure people can make and have made similar arguments against the availability of coronary bypass surgery (it removes personal responsibility since smokers and people with unhealthy diets can just go for an operation), condoms (it de-sanctifies sex and promotes sexual promiscuity) and the Internet (pointing and clicking is so much easier and thus less meaningful than flipping through real books and journals) and restaurants (no longer do we eat food prepared with love and the personal touch, but outsource the whole process and thus alienate ourselves from our food)..

(I'm told the Shitty Times published this today. They're so slow - The Guardian did this 21 months ago.)